The closure of Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti's play Behzti ("Dishonour") in Birmingham last month generated strong comment about freedom of speech. The play was due to open at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre when a few hundred Sikhs protested. A group ran past the police, stormed into the theatre and inflicted damage.
The theatre management decided to cancel the play on the basis that the audience's health and safety were at risk. All hell broke loose in the national press.
The local Sikh community was incensed, we were told, because the writer had set the play, including the sexual abuse of a young Sikh girl, in a Sikh temple. The producers were urged to change the setting to a community centre. When they refused, the conflict could be resolved only by cancelling the whole of the play's run.
Those who deplored the decision were concerned that this relatively new group of immigrants had successfully challenged a tradition, long held to be sacrosanct, that the artist is free to express dissent in his or her work even in a sacrilegious form.
Yet I am not convinced that the Sikhs' challenge was as serious as the pundits claim. In order to make their point, press commentators had to elevate a demonstration by a handful of middle-aged men into something akin to the storming of the Winter Palace. There were references to a riot. Nothing of the kind occurred. I have been in and around riots in England, in America, in the Caribbean. What occurred outside the Birmingham Rep was a skirmish involving a puny section of the half-million Sikhs in Britain.
After that, everybody missed the point. For years, we have been told that Asian women are being murdered (in honour killings) and sexually abused by Asian men, all in the name of religious practice. Dissent among Asian women has been growing significantly. Only recently, a young Sikh woman appeared on television to announce a conference, involving Asian women, state prosecutors and police, to discuss how to tackle the murderers and sexual abusers. Religious leaders saw Behzti as an attempt to broaden and deepen this challenge.
It is not freedom of speech that is at stake here - it is much more than that. It is literally a question of life and death for many Asian women.
The producers of the play failed to appreciate this point. They empowered the Sikh leaders by involving them in co-editing the script. They even accepted cuts suggested by these religious reactionaries. It was bound to end in disaster and it did.
